


stray cat

by kanaru



Series: ghost stories [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Turned Into a Ghost, Getting to Know Each Other, Ghosts, Graphic Description, Horror, Implied/Referenced Suicide, It's not actually so scary or angsty, M/M, Murder, Sawamura gets a pet cat, Talking To Dead People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24298258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kanaru/pseuds/kanaru
Summary: Following a traumatic incident of a murder-suicide investigation, officer Sawamura returns to the house of his nightmares on an emergency call to find something both unexpected and chilling.
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou/Sawamura Daichi
Series: ghost stories [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1754161
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	stray cat

**Author's Note:**

> I suppose I'm into horror lately... and I'm condemning KuroDai to my experiments.  
> Just a heads up, there's a pretty graphic description of dead bodies, please be aware before reading! It's not actually a horrific story though, I promise (other than the start).

The last time he was at that house, Sawamura vividly recalled the scent of anguished death. The blood had coagulated into the kitchen tiles, the bodies stiff with dissipating rigor mortis as their lax expressions were contorted into horror on their way to the afterlife. Whispers floated across the rooms, questions of _why, how, who could do such a thing?_ An officer, young and fresh as Sawamura was, had to retreat to vomit on the porch. He was gently scolded, even the more veteran officers finding the situation hard to stomach.

The staircase creaked ominously as Sawamura took cautious steps to the upper floor, the air tangible and unbreathable. He could feel his lips move and his vocals strained as he called out to no one in particular, notifying whatever soul could be listening that the police were on the premises. He couldn’t hear himself, however, the sound drowned behind his hammering heart and gushing blood flow screaming in his ears. 

An incessant dripping from the bathroom drew Sawamura’s attention, the undistinguished sound somehow notable past all of the other noise. He followed through, hovering before the ajar door where he felt his veins run cold and fingertips grow numb. He announced himself again, far less confident and reduced to a pathetic waver of his trapped vocals. When the door creaked open, Sawamura held his breath.

The victim’s face was submerged in the inky red bathtub, the water no longer translucent as the wet and matted down muss for black hair was only in view as Sawamura stepped closer.

 _The smell._ Sawamura’s eyes watered desperately, his numb steps moving closer and closer to the corpse doubled over the edge of the bathtub, his stiffened hands resting on the edge with his nails broken and black from desperately attempting to save himself by raking them down the edges of the bathtub and the killer’s arms. 

Sawamura’s hand reached for his own face, grasping at his skin to somehow block out the unforgettable stench of death and prevent himself from hurling. He watched as the bloodied water laid eerily still as the corpse had become nothing more than an ornament to the scene. 

As Sawamura turned to face the doorway, his transceiver in hand ready to report his findings, he _knew_ he heard the audible, particular sound of a mere few bubbles breaking the surface of the tainted water. He spun around without thinking, reaching with false hope to the body before the pale hand gripped at his wrist, the face jerking from the water with those milky glazed eyes staring at him in horror as his lips parted and shrieked at him with distorted and inhuman vocals. 

Sawamura didn’t hear himself scream back, fumbling in terror at the locked grip on his wrist as he noted black and brown teeth broken on the right side alongside his features visibly disfigured above his damaged teeth. Eventually, he managed to recoil free, and the body fell backward onto the cold tiles with a copious amount of the bathtub water following from the jerked movement. 

When he scrambled for the door and listened to his fellow officers calling out to him, Sawamura turned to see the body was just as it was; a still corpse. 

Five years down the road, Sawamura still had the scar denting his wrist from where the nails gripped onto him. There was no real explanation as it was confirmed the seventeen-year-old schoolboy had been dead for days and there was no chance he could have still been alive. After movements were another presumption, however, Sawamura knew well enough that occurrence was nothing as mere as an after movement. It certainly wasn’t something as innocent as a twitch.

_“He didn’t just drown the kid, he managed to smash his face at the bottom of the tub. The autopsy came back and shows he got his lungs crushed and punctured by his ribs breaking on the edge of the tub, so he was drowning in his own blood as well as the water.”_

_“Damn, how can you kill someone like that…?”_

Sawamura shivered at the thought of how those poor people were murdered. He wondered how a man could fall so low into killing his own parents and then proceeding to brutally murdering his son before hanging himself. He was a coward, running away from the consequences of his monstrous actions. 

Now there he sat, in his patrol car outside of that very house following a silent emergency call. He hadn’t returned to the house in the five years he resided in Tokyo, refusing to patrol anywhere near the neighborhood as the memories stuck clear and vivid in his mind, slipping their way into his less than restful nights of sleep. Sawamura had only recently grown confident enough to patrol the neighborhood again, but it was just his luck to get drawn to the house again. 

_“You sure you’re okay with this?”_ a voice asked through the car’s transceiver. Sawamura stared at the dashboard for a long moment before pressing the button down to answer.

“Yeah, it’s no big deal. It’s likely a prank call from some kids messing around this house again.”

His fellow officer laughed on the other end. _“Daredevils love it there, they say it’s the most haunted house in Tokyo.”_

Sawamura rolled his eyes and looked towards the dark casted house again. “Kids these days… All right, I’m gonna go check it out.”

_“Good luck.”_

Perhaps Sawamura wasn’t as fully settled with his past with the house as he had initially convinced himself to be. As he stepped out of the car, the familiar feeling of pure dread overcame him. Sawamura could only viciously mutter to himself that it was only a damn house and there was nothing more to it. His wary gaze trailed up and to his horror, he was sure he saw a dark figure standing in the upstairs bathroom window. 

Taking a deep gulp and pressing his eyes shut, Sawamura managed to regain his composure. “Kids,” he told himself, before looking back at the window. There was no one there. 

The front door was unsurprisingly left ajar and Sawamura pushed it open. “Police department, responding to an emergency call.” The silent house didn’t respond back to him, and Sawamura took another step inside. “If this is a prank you better leave now before you get in trouble.”

An abrupt and soft mewl from below startled Sawamura far more than it should have, his frenzied gaze darting down to meet with a skinny black cat. 

“Jesus— fuck!” he hissed, his voice failing to spook the cat who laced in and out between his ankles. “I don’t suppose it was you who made the call, huh?”

The cat looked up with vivid green eyes, another pitched mewl sounding in response. Sawamura shook his head and chuckled to himself for really talking to a cat. 

“Hey, you don’t wanna hang around here,” Sawamura warned, his attention elsewhere as he treaded further into the house on high alert. “Some bad stuff happened in this house.”

As if on cue, the small creature darted up the stairs leaving Sawamura to himself.

“Or just ignore my advice, that’s fine too,” he mumbled. He stood for a moment longer before he heard a creak directly overhead of himself. His first thought was that it was probably the cat, but his logic kicked in and he knew a skinny cat like that couldn’t possibly be as heavy stepped as that. Sawamura pinched the bridge of his nose before working himself the courage to go upstairs. His last experience in the house ran loud and clear in his mind, just like he was reliving the day again.

“Police here, you better come out if you’re hiding,” he called again, hoping his voice didn’t sound as scared as he actually was. “Prank calls are an offense you know.”

The small creature butted against his ankles again, the motion not taken as a scare before the cat wandered up the hallway towards the bathroom. Sawamura’s eyes followed the cat, expecting to see the doorway to the bathroom but instead saw something far worse.

The figure stood tall at perhaps pushing above six foot, black hair atrociously messy and weighed down with moisture as the excess water dripped against the old hardwood flooring. 

_Drip, drip._

Sawamura’s mouth gaped as a sound of disbelief and terror croaked at the back of his throat. The features were obscured by the night time darkness, but Sawamura could distinguish the paleness to his skin and the deep, almost black substance running from his nose and right side of his face. He forced his eyes to look elsewhere, only managing to land on the bloodied, snapped, and torn off nails. 

His mind screamed at him to run, but Sawamura’s muscles locked him in place. The thing that broke the silence was not him shouting out, but instead, the damn cat mewling and rubbing itself up against the figure’s ankles as it did with Sawamura. He watched as the figure’s attention was slowly taken off of him, and down to the creature ignorantly begging for attention and affection. 

“Kuroo… Tetsurou?” Sawamura finally managed to ask, inwardly wondering why he hadn’t managed to run out of the door yet.

Supposedly Kuroo looked back at Sawamura. “The cat’s been here for weeks,” he said simply, moving gradually into a leak of moonlight between himself and Sawamura. Sawamura had expected to be horrified at what he might see, but instead, Kuroo’s face was revealed as undamaged and maybe just a little on the pale side. He looked _alive_. “She gets some scraps out of the trash from other houses nearby, but I don’t think it’s much.”

It took Sawamura a long moment to process his current situation before he realized this spirit, ghost, whatever Kuroo was, was talking about the cat’s diet. “I— _what_?”

Kuroo’s brows raised only slightly before his lips pulled into a small smirk. “Could you feed the cat?”

The silence stretched for another few minutes, the ghost surprisingly respecting Sawamura’s bafflement as he worked his head around what on earth was going on. It wasn’t long before he cracked into hollow laughter, shaking his head and turning away from Kuroo. “I’ve gone mad.”

“Perhaps a shrink might help.”

“You—” Sawaura turned on his heel with a pointed figure jabbing towards Kuroo, only to find he was standing obnoxiously closer than before. He startled backward and stumbled over his words. “Dead! You died— I saw your body five years ago— and now you’re asking me to feed a damn cat?!”

Kuroo appeared bemused by Sawamura’s declaration that he was dead before he breathed out a laugh that soon turned into something full of life. It sounded sort of awful, but Sawamura felt the air thin to something breathable, the muscles in his rigidly frozen shoulders loosening somewhat. “Sorry,” said Kuroo, between a glimmer of a moment he had to breathe between his laugh. “I don’t really know how to accommodate my attempts to talk to still living people. Actually, you‘re the first.”

Sawamura’s brows knitted together. “This not a usual occurrence?”

“No,” he admitted. “I’d love to scare more people but I can’t really reach far enough for them to hear me talk. I suppose it’s because I grabbed you that time you found me, it’s made you… different from the others.”

He glanced down to his wrist, the calloused skin more visible in the pearl lighting. Kuroo had stepped even closer without Sawamura’s knowledge, his stark white fingers poking at Sawamura’s raised skin at his wrist. Instinctively, he jumped backward. “God damn— could you at least warn me before you do that?”

“Sorry,” he said, grinning with that mysterious beam of his. “Did I do that?”

“You were going to rip my arm off.”

“I didn’t expect to grab that hard, I was still kinda out of the loop that I was dead.”

It made no sense to Sawamura, really. He wasn’t sure of the rules of the afterlife and how Kuroo somehow managed to conjure his corpse into grabbing him. In fact, he wasn’t even sure if that entire conversation was real or not, but he swung with it anyway. He jolted at the thought of Kuroo’s first question.

“Oh, the cat,” said Sawamura. “I uh… do you want me to take her with me?”

He looked a little sad at the suggestion, but he nodded anyway. “She’s my talking buddy, but yeah I guess that’s best.”

Sawamura snickered at him. “I’m sure she doesn’t understand a word you say anyway.”

“Hey,” Kuroo whined indignantly. “She’s stuck around long enough! She must understand something.”

“I think she’s just expecting you to feed her. Though… I guess she would have been clever enough to bolt already seeing how utterly useless you are.”

“Now you’re just insulting me,” Kuroo said with a cute pout. Sawamura felt himself wince at the thought that this ghost was cute. “Well officer, at least I haven’t got a case of nocturnal enuresis.”

“Nocturnal what now?”

Kuroo’s eyes gleamed in mischief. “Y’know, bedwetting.”

Sawamura glowered at him. “I do not wet the bed! The hell did you get that idea from?”

“Are you sure? You seem kinda jumpy around here, did I traumatize you that bad on our first meeting?”

“A corpse grabbed me; _your_ corpse grabbed me, and then screamed in my face. Asshole.”

He threw his hands up either side of himself in surrender, that infuriating toothy smile lighting his face up. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to do that, I was just trying to will myself back to life or something.”

“Nearly made it,” Sawamura snorted, not before his features fell flat and he noticed the sadness in Kuroo’s eyes. “I’m sorry that happened to you… it was—”

“Shitty, I know,” Kuroo finished for him. “Well, that’s in the past and here we are!”

Sawamura’s attention was returned to the cat sitting idly at Kuroo’s feet, her tail swishing from side to side as she quietly observed the two. “She got a name?”

“Cat.”

“Cat,” Sawamura repeated after him, feeling himself pull a face. “How creative.”

“The goal was to not get too attached but my strategy didn’t work out so well.”

“Hey, did you make the emergency call?”

Kuroo cocked an eyebrow up. “Does it look like I have a phone?”

“I don’t know what kind of ghostly powers you might have,” Sawamura reasoned. 

Kuroo cracked a laugh out and shifted his ochre eyes towards the phone on the wall. It was disconnected. “Well, I mean I didn’t know it would work.”

“So it was you,” Sawamura remarked, following his attention to the old phone. “This is the weirdest night ever.”

“Are you sure it’s real?”

The words came as a hollow question, something that struck an ice cord within Sawamura’s spine. As he returned his gaze to Kuroo, he was gone, leaving him with just the cat. He stood there for a long moment after, musing over what the hell was going on before laughing mirthlessly at himself. He had definitely gone crazy.

“Of course not…” He murmured to the empty space before him, reaching down to gently lift up the unresisting feline. Despite his disbelief, he took a final glance around the dark house. “Goodbye, Kuroo.”

  
  


The hot pot restaurant brimmed with life, the air thick with cigarette smoke and vivid in laughter and conversations. Sawamura was with his colleagues, filling his hot pot with more than the average amount of food someone would attempt to eat on a daily basis. Sawamura had no shame in his food-loving behavior. 

“I never thought you’d be a cat person,” Iwaizumi commented as he added the sliced beef to his broth. 

Sawamura snorted, admiring his food cook in the bubbling liquid. “I’m not, it just happened.”

“Have you given it a name yet?”

He hummed thoughtfully for a moment, realizing he hadn’t even thought so far ahead. “Cat will do.”

“You’re a terrible owner, give the damn thing to Yachi.”

Sawamura chuckled and took his eyes away from his steaming food before him for what felt like the first time in ten minutes. His colleague, Moniwa, paled as he stared in his direction, an expression that made Sawamura incredibly uneasy. “What is it, Moniwa?”

“Oh, nothing… I thought I just saw a really white hand on your shoulder. Ah, I’m definitely drunk!” 

His breath hitched in his throat as the comment made him aware of the vague weight pressing on his shoulder. Sawamura felt the sound around him dim as he reluctantly looked to where he felt the pressure; he saw familiar bloodied, broken nails grasping at his shirt.

**Author's Note:**

> Sawamura, looks like you've brought another stray cat home with you...


End file.
